Windows 7 Upgrade - Will it work from XP MSDN?

You cannot upgrade directly from Windows XP to windows 7. You can only upgrade from Vista SP1.

It is not an issue of legality...it's just the XP can't be upgraded to Win 7.

You can get the upgrade version but once you verify with the install the drive has to be formatted and Win 7 loaded on a clean drive. The way to do it is , depending on the size of your current hdd go into disk management and shrink the size of the partition the your OS is on and then make whats left into a seperate partition and load Win 7 on that . This way the upgrade version will work because you are verifying a previous version but not upgrading it over XP.

If you have a legal version of XP, which you do, then yes, you can upgrade. During the install of 7, choose custom install. Your XP will be renamed windows.old. After installing 7, you can get your old files/data from windows.old.

You should make a backup first.

Thanks for all of the information. What I'm wondering is, is it possible to do the custom install to a different hard drive? That way I can go back later and format the other one.

Legally, upgrading means getting rid of your old OS, so I'd say no. If you want to maintain both computers, you will need a full copy of 7 instead of the upgrade disk.